Devil's Tor

by David Lindsay

  Yet being set against the embattled sweet affections of womankind that were the everlasting theme of song and story the expected and honoured tendernesses of those in whom they were meet, as well as the other darker passions of the law-breaking—how wonderful in its selfless endurance seemed that journeying through the night of storm and pain, for no raptures, no thoughts of a haven at last. Should not it be the perfect justification to a woman of her womanhood? For indeed it was the sacrifice that every woman in her profoundest heart must be desiring. …

  Verily, to be born like Mary of her child, a woman must make heavy sacrifices. The wild ascent to the stars before marriage, the dreamlike wandering hand-in-hand down an eternal forest path afterwards, towards hope, ever hope!—these must be renounced: and still, most fearful of all, she must marry. … And, against every light instinct of a girl, she must always have shunned the world, while remaining of it. She must have refused homage to her own body's beauty, though addressed to it by an unending stream of temptation. So must she have exposed herself to the scom and amusement of other women, and to the wonder and defamation of men. … And must have hated dark damp churches, with their hypocritical priests... and have kept herself innocent from the arts, given over to worldliness: and not stupefied her spirit with much reading: and not destroyed it with sports and laughter. … She must have dwelt among the grand grey shapes and shades of the immemorial past. Her familiars must have been the mists, rains, winds, the secret moors or mountains: while always in her soul must have been that singular sense of something presently to befall her that should be like nothing that ever yet had happened to any. …

  So Ingrid described herself, knowing that such a nature was impossible to be acquired, but either was or was not to a woman. And yet too certainly she was shutting her eyes to her dross. For no girl could grow to be a woman without having made a million surrenders—of dress, of agreeableness, of enjoyment; even of flattery. Small was the need to enumerate: had not she descended to common love?...

  This far blue mountain daybreak perpetually before her eyes—it was like a liquid conflagration. But its wisdom was so slow, it was as if her ignorant mind were between, yielding elastically, but never bursting. … Oh, that her life might be one long wound!—passion! passion! ... How frightful seemed to her suddenly the old craving to live at peace within her instincts!...

  But if in shocking truth that passion could be for her, by what marks—by what signs...? For he—that necessary man, who should present himself in the spirit of these unearthly moments... he must not stand out from others, there must be no attraction—not that treacherous deceitful downhill path to a fascination of sex. … Rather should they hate. For her he must be nothing: a man unmarked, unsignalised—indistinguishable. … Then should he bear a supernatural token. …

  As from her sight, so from her mind were those two gone whom Peter had left behind with her upon this hill-top. Only at midnight, in her room at home, came to her that it had been intended she should thereafter through her life know the certainty that her choice had not been influenced. Had she recalled who should be standing beside her, doubtless for many years her doubts must have remained of the deathliest. …

  But what should be his motive—his reward... that one who, from her should receive nothing? Never might they grow familiar: not his were to be the awful raptures of that mystic bringing forth. Perhaps from the Ancient he would receive a gift of passion. …

  Indeed, before that fearful Mother of all creation, had still been the Ancient. … Therefore of two passions must such a child be born: as other children, of two lusts. But here could be no sensuality, for their bodies, even in being used, were to be forgotten. … By his eyes she would know him, and they would be the sign. No adoration in them of her would there be; but the presence of an agony. … And the child should be from their two agonies, and not from themselves: not towards their joy. …

  Yet he would be the nobler, for that he would be servant of a servant, and know no rank even in surrender. So must she revere him. For the like humility must Mary also have reverenced Joseph, though none other did. On account of his anguish in the Eternal, bringing him no mortal blessedness, must Mary have willed to join herself to him, understanding that from him alone could the Christ within her come.

  Why went she so much back to Mary?

  She felt not Mary's kindness for her fellow-creatures. She was not quick to see good. Sometimes she fancied that souls had long since died in the world: that loving-kindness was but an instinct of association, heroism the same, and nobility a fastidiousness of the educated mind. But all such deceits were real to those practising them and to the others admiring them—until the terrible temporary world of mud, blood and bubbles was become for everyone a palace of infinite glittering possibility, outside which was—nothing. And Mary, to have borne Christ, must have believed the corruption of hearts curable but she herself no longer believed that.

  She least of all women was like Mary. Yet always now was it seeming to her that Mary might best have counselled her in this dreadful time. For not only Christ had been crucified, but Mary too. The faith, the character, were little things. …

  There was no need that she should be Mary. The teachings of her Son remained, and could not die, until nobler should be taught. But His teachings alone had not been enough. At His coming, the old peoples were dead: a new sweetness, a new cleanness, were preparing in the North, whose innocent giants of the snows and forests were to move southwards with their wholesome souls, high hearts, manhood, simplicity, and veneration of the invisible. Then, in a little while, had they found in Christ's words the lessons He had put there against their coming. … But now that race too was degenerate and irreligious. Another Christ could not raise a dead world from its tomb. He who should raise another race to receive the first Christ would be of more worth than a second Christ. …

  Terrible was this prayer of her heart: that another race, possessing souls anew, should suddenly come! ... For thus once more, in the name of the Ancient, destruction must float over the face of the earth, to wither all the happiness of decadence to its very roots, and fill the world with groans and curses, and the white-faced spectres of men and women, and sudden death.

  She that should be permitted to offer her single self to the sacrifice truly would need to resemble the infinite Mother of all; Who likewise had been permitted, by the Ancient. But in Herself the Mother was nothing: only a living Pity for those born to terror within Her Womb. Not even was She Her own Pity; but She was the Pity of the Ancient on account of that forced into foulness and mortality, for a Purpose. … So she, a mortal woman, to whom it should fearfully be given to bear another annihilating race, she also must be nothing but a living sorrow for all the agonies born and to be born of her. For more than the men of a race must her womb contain. She must be mother, too, of horrors and madnesses, men shattered, women demented, children starved and orphaned, the skies never silent for the ascending sounds of the undone. … Her responsibility could be no less.

  Unless her sorrow were so living that her heart also could be broken for the breaking of all those other hearts in their pain sprung directly out of her single existence on earth, how could she endure to be the instrument of the Ancient, though her intelligence should grope towards the shadow of a Design? How could she endure it for the mere human triumph of one race of men alone? Those others outside such a race—the dispossessed, the unworshipping; the merely suffering—they also were in creation. The torture of one soul in the Ancient, the emergence of another soul to the Ancient, they were a single operation. … Unless that mortal mother of nobler souls should shudder perpetually in heart for her deed to those destroyed ignobler ones—should weep always, and become as phantom as they... she was not of the infinite Mother. … It were better she had never been born. …

  Upon the inky castellation defining that blue glare which crowned it, stepped a silver form... of a woman draped. For a time she stood there like an unmoving flame.

&
nbsp; She seemed as distant as a fainter star, so marvellously small she was to see: yet Ingrid was given to distinguish her clearly. It was the spirit who sometimes had been so close to her. Now she was as if across a sky of space.

  Then she went out, also like a flame: but at once the weirdest sequence began instead. Saltfleet too saw it, and was confounded. No advancing source of light was ever visible; yet, from where the silver form had stood, a passage came towards them of successive blue-silvery glows, showing but at intervals; and as they did so—as the glows approached—they were bringing into fleeting view wonderful features of the intervening different regions of space... the nature of which was incomprehensible: while the space they had thought empty.

  Otherwise all to their eyes was night: for when the silver shape had vanished, the far blue fire had vanished also. These glows might be the shape; the fire was no more for them.

  But the regions in succession shone upon seemed neither void like air, nor as a flat landscape, but to possess the boundlessness of air or space, while containing, as though they floated free, the hints of great natural masses which should surely have demanded the solid core of a mineral world for base. There were, moreover, the strangest other existences in the regions, that also were never revealed, but merely suggested, by the dim uncertain radiance. Nearly the tops of mountains—not quite lakes—monstrous, passive forms that might or might not be of life—rushings-together of things, and violent pullings-apart... it was like a mythological world, heavy with dark, fabulous shapes and allegories, and personifications of primal nature. …

  Yet invariably the thing so merging and disappearing as in a thought, beneath that glowing which never itself was caused, seemed nearer than the last to the watchers: and still all distance was incalculable, for time contradicted space. The completed passage should be of the breadth of the eye's whole universe, but while the chain of gleams remained so leisurely, the latest already was close upon them.

  Then Ingrid believed that she was seeing the lowest of the heavens. She thought that certain wise men in the ancient past might have seen it too, and been divinely inspired. … Saltfleet, however, considered that the fecund night before his eyes might be to the half-mystic ether of modern science what that ether should be to the gross matter of the senses. If out of ether matter was formed, out of these unutterable suggestions of things the inter-stellar universe of invisible substance, named ether, might be formed. For it was incredible that the rich variety of the world's teeming life should have arisen from the simple mechanical action of electric whirls. … Thus this night was like a second step inwards from the life-ground of the body, where it played, worked, and wondered; while still there was no beginning of a simple origin—no approach to an explanatory unity. Then should not variety, perhaps, be stamped through and through creation, to express the fearful essence of the Ancient? ...

  But soon the light caught them, and bathed them, lingering but whilst they might know and remember each the other.

  Neither exclaimed: only Ingrid beheld in her companion's face, illuminated by this pale silver shining, what in it she had never remarked before, though always it had been there—its scorn, not of men, but of the littleness of men, which had presented but the unconsciousness of his own worship of the Height. … And she understood that this was the sign she had been to await—that this was he. … But Saltfleet perceived in the drawn pain of those young, moonlike features the stern unearthliness which his swollen soul might best approve discovering in them no beauty.

  Then was restored to him his unspeakable sensation of being pierced throughout his nature, as far as to his very seed, by the white-hot finger of the angel that was his nearest wisdom to the Ancient... Whose claiming of him was as an exultation in him, because freely and contemptuously he was to cast away his worn life, in the remembrance of that awful Purpose.

  Neither to any other end was she here, with him. A child—a man, that should be a spirit, was to enter life, without whose coming all the past agonies of the world must have stood suspended in memory, a dream. But, for as long as this pain and this sternness should ward her approaches, he knew never could he feast his imagination upon her loveliness, that other unwanted ones should enter, instead of that one. …

  Their eyes avoided the other's. It was not from fearfulness, nor to conceal their souls: it was that the love appropriate between man and woman was never to go between them: and so there was no need for them to seek each other's eyes. Indeed, neither saw the other's person, but only as that counterpart instrument of a will. Their pulses were not hastened because he should be a man, and she a woman.

  Their lunar light further took from their humanity. In after life they, though none else, were to see each other thus in the rarest hours, when their moods were most raised above common existence. Ever was it to be the most terrible of reminders. …

  But now too quickly the glow left them; and they were again in night.

  The sky was full of natural stars. They felt that they had dropped suddenly to vulgarity. … Obeying Saltfleet's swift movement of turning, Ingrid beheld with him, high in the sprinkled blackness, a star that was brighter and more fairly gleaming than the others, of a strange blue... plainly falling, but very slowly. It grew in beauty, and she saw its path to be a curve. She never doubted but that the star was the same with the moving glow she had seen across that other universe: only, now that it could no longer make gifts, it became itself. Perhaps in this simpler world its power should be different, and more, or less: and it descended, because the plane had changed. … Or it lighted no shapes in passing, because in this dead material world all shapes had sunk to the bottom, and were piled, one upon another.

  The star vanished suddenly. A body tore past their ears in the darkness. … Saltfleet thought to have recalled a previous happening that had once astonished him: but his passion on another account was deep, his objective mind confused and careless. Then there had been more sights and sounds, but now it was finished; silent. The girl with him, who had become a woman, comprehended that she had witnessed the entering into body of that ancient Mother. She would have knelt had not all her soul been stunned by its own transfiguration.

  But when she could think again, she supposed that she had been shown the manner of occurrence of this event in order that never afterwards might she be at the mercy of those more intellectual than herself, who might try to persuade her of her imagined folly. And yet it could not matter, and she cared nothing... she wished not to understand things, but only to keep alive the pure pain and grief of her surrender, whether in ignorance or otherwise. Indeed, she wished to have done with all those hideous reminiscent prides and curiosities of the old Ingrid Fleming, that could but drag her back into personal life. To her terrible election she hoped to be permitted to join, as a condition, that the rest of her days should pass inconspicuous and humble; that she should be without the cleverness and genius and distinction of other women. …

  The blackness gave place to a dusky grey, through which the familiar features of the top of Devil's Tor began to show vaguely.

  They saw the dark upright shape of Arsinal, swaying, between themselves and that part of the hill nearest to the valley. And while they went on impotently looking, in distress for this first intrusion upon them of the coarsenesses that must now be awaited from the world, he still did not fall, but appeared rather to sink to the ground as from some progressive failure of his supporting frame. … He continued lying there, a shadowy shape of repose, his down-turned face hidden upon a bended arm.

  Thereupon Saltfleet's old human instincts began to move again within him, and, scarcely realising what he did, he took those steps—not many—to the senseless man. It grew lighter still. …

  The phantom personality, then, of that infinitesimal part of the Ancient which men had termed "Stephen Arsinal" was truly dispersed. The mystic red stream of his channels, upon which his false life had floated, was suddenly arrested as at the magnetic command of a word across the times and spa
ces; and that ghost was stripped of its unreal substance. …

  He fancied that Ingrid had called out to him by his two names, but at a future time she averred she had not done so. However, believing that he was so summoned, he turned... and perceived that the Spirit of that other dead One stood, at enormous height, directly between himself and Ingrid, whom he imagined to have called to him for the purpose of his seeing. … Never had Her flesh been so bright... but Her eyes, somehow, he looked not for. …

  She retreated, still facing him—back—back, to Ingrid behind Her... with whom, incomprehensibly, She became incorporated—so departing. … But Ingrid at the same moment beheld that moonlike Shape—so diminished—so human—recede from her direction towards Saltfleet... to become a cloud of silver glory before She reached him... and so envelop him, and vanish. …

  Again the desolate hill-top was in departing day. Again those weird tremendous clouds filled the four skies, while in the west the elf-window lingered. The wind came up in great abrupt gusts, that were like threats of the evils preparing for them in the world below.

  They drew slowly together, regarding each other. And each saw how the other's countenance gleamed... with such a gleaming that for long they dared not speak, yet might not let fall their eyes.

  Saltfleet stirred at last, breaking the spell of stupor.

  "We must go. We cannot stay here."

  But she responded only by a movement that spoke nothing.

  "You know he is dead?"

  "Yes."

  "The stones are gone."

  Then Ingrid, after another moment, said:

  "I will not see him. I wish my last remembrance of this place to be of life."

  "That I understand."

  "For unless this hill has been of life, I would pray to be mercifully dead myself."

  "Let us not talk of this now," he answered.

  There was a longer pause.

  "The joined stone," said Ingrid, "—you mean it has been withdrawn altogether?"